Sajid Javid ‘leaning towards’ mandatory Covid jab for NHS staff (England)

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Amity Island said:
As discussed in Dr John Campbells video "Natural versus vaccine immunity" based on his evidence it's established that natural infection / immunity (for those unlucky enough to have caught the virus e.g NHS staff)) will likely give them long lasting protection.
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There's some doubt (and likely variation between people).
https://twitter.com/x/status/1454159035092045840
Amity Island said:
On a positive note in the latest antibody survey, we are over 90% in England so effectively means we are already within herd immunity?
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Immunity is complex. I don't think anyone's felt confident about herd immunity for a while now: the fear is that the Delta variant replicates so fast that even someone with high immunity might catch it for a few days so nobody can be considered to have perfect immunity which means you'd need an even higher proportion of the population vaccinated or previously infected.
The Flawed Science of Antibody Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Immunity
 
Bruce Stephens said:
There's some doubt (and likely variation between people).
https://twitter.com/x/status/1454159035092045840

Immunity is complex. I don't think anyone's felt confident about herd immunity for a while now: the fear is that the Delta variant replicates so fast that even someone with high immunity might catch it for a few days so nobody can be considered to have perfect immunity which means you'd need an even higher proportion of the population vaccinated or previously infected.
The Flawed Science of Antibody Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Immunity
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Anyway, 10's of thousands of daily cases and hundreds of deaths would seem to rule out "herd immunity" right now.
 
I doubt that this particular virus will be lasting only two years. It is much more likely to be around forever, mingling with the other coronaviruses that cause 20% of our common colds. That is the usual trajectory.

And I also doubt that the NHS England will be around for everyone, forever, as long as the fans of private health insurance are running the country. Already, in England, GP practices are being bought up by American healthcare companies.

None of this is happening in NHS Scotland, where there are no private companies supplying services to the NHS, and never will be.
 
Liked your analysis in your previous post @mikeyB - straightforward common sense.

The thing I find difficult to get a real handle on are the relative risks of the various approaches. I can cope with the extremes. Snogging somebody dripping with the virus is will give you covid with a probability of 0.9999999. Locking yourself away in a sterile room will keep you free of it with a probability of .0000001. What about the other things?

So, what is the probability of becoming infected on a visit to a supermarket. How does that compare with a visit to a nightclub or a school or being a medic or a wander round town or walk in the countryside. How are each of those risks affected by being vaccinated, keeping a social distance or wearing a mask?

When it comes to being infected, what is the probability of the effects being at a level which require home medical attention or a stay in hospital or the services of a funeral director. How do those probabilities vary with vaccination, your state of health or where you happen to live.

My gut instinct is that being vaccinated makes a significant change in risks irrespective of anything else but that wearing a mask will only be a significant benefit in a narrow band of circumstances. It's a gut instinct only because I don't have the data to work out the probabilities for myself and if somebody else is doing it, I have not seen their conclusions.

Can't help but think that a bit of numerical analysis would go a long way to focussing debates like mask wearing or vaccination which generally finish up with an "I'm right you're wrong argument".

Good job the nuclear industry was not run this way. Safety decisions were always made on consensus derived from a numerical assessment of risk. If things did not work out as assessed then at least you could go back and work out where you went wrong and improve things for the future. This was generally done without rancour because it focussed on numerical analysis and not opinionated argument.
 
Looked at the reference hoping to find some answers to the points I made in my post above. I will have to keep on looking!
 
Amity Island said:
Hi @Docb

I think it would probably help as a starter if we knew where the virus came from. Is it a natural virus? or has it been played with in some lab to try and make it more dangerous (a.k.a. gain of function)? If this was known, a lot of the questions you raised could probably be answered, because if it was designed/made more dangerous, then they would also likely know the answer to some of your questions.

In a paper (see extract below) it makes it clear that the official story of the virus coming from a horeshoe bat, is highly unlikley for the simple fact they stopped selling them in the Wuhan wet markets long before the virus emerged.

"In 2002, horseshoe bats were sold in China’s wet markets and are thought to have jumped to humans from there. By 2019, horseshoe bats were no longer sold in the wet markets. Nor do they live in the wild near Wuhan. As Chinese researcher Huabin Zhao, Department of Ecology, Hubei Key Laboratory of Cell Homeostasis, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University. Pointed out in Science, “COVID-19 was linked to horseshoe bats, which do not hibernate in cities in China.” They are used in biomedical research, however, and Wuhan, the city in which COVID-19 originated, has two such labs."

"Researchers investigating the virus’s origins speculate a scientist may have been bitten by a bat and become infected."

www.biospace.com

Compare Update: 2003 SARS Pandemic Versus 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic

SARS was called the first pandemic of the 21st century. It would not be the last. Nor would it be the most deadly.
www.biospace.com www.biospace.com
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Not sure about that Amity. Where it came from does not affect the risks that I was curious about.

And Eddy, if the quote you give is right, then that removes one factor in my quest to numerically assess risks. It would be a right pain if the risks associated with resistance from infection were different to those from vaccination.
 
My thought was that there ought to be enough data around from the pandemic itself to make an attempt at numerically assessing the risks and the effect of the various attempts to minimise its effects.
 
Docb said:
My thought was that there ought to be enough data around from the pandemic itself to make an attempt at numerically assessing the risks and the effect of the various attempts to minimise its effects.
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I think (especially with the delta variant, which is so much easier to spread) it's just hard to get good figures. The ONS infection survey chart I showed earlier makes an attempt for just the effects of vaccinations and prior infections, but even there you can see the large error bars. We have some on face masks but not a whole lot.

I think we're stuck with what you said earlier: some things are easy (it's airborne so outdoors is safer than indoors, outdoors on a windy day is better than on a quiet day, indoors with really good ventilation is better than with poor ventilation), but quantifying it all is much harder.
 
Amity Island said:
This came out today, worth a look? what do you make of it?
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From that well known neutral body the HART group? Probably deliberate nonsense, though I'm not sure quite what they've got wrong.

The general denominator problem has been well discussed and probably doesn't have a great solution. The ONS publication series you mention has lead to a letter from the Office for Statistics Regulation because of the risk of misinterpretation, https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov...g-covid-19-by-vaccination-status-publication/
 
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